The Knitter's Gift: An Inspirational Bag of Words, Wisdom, and Craft

By Bernadette Murphy

Passionate knitters know that knitting is more than just a craft or a hobby. Knitting forms the texture and a background for their lives, binding them to their mothers and grandmothers who shared their great legacies; to friends and family who wear their homemade gifts; and to their fellow knitters. The Knitter's Gift is an inspirational collection just for them.
Beginner and longtime knitters will rejoice as they read about:

• A father who treasures the scarf made by his daughter decades earlier
• A Ph.D. candidate who finds that knitting reduces her stress, and allows her to knit together her higher education with her craft
• A mother-in-law who makes peace with her daughter-in-law by creating a luxurious handmade gift

Written and compiled by this best-selling author, The Knitter's Gift is a timeless work that spans the generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Sep 10, 2004
• ISBN: 9781440518904

Bernadette Murphy

Bernadette Murphy was born and raised in the U.K. She has lived in the south of France for most of her adult life and worked in many different fields. Van Gogh’s Ear is her first book.

Book preview

Introduction

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Two years ago, I released a book about my own spiritual and creative experience as a knitter—Zen and the Art of Knitting—that allowed me to look into aspects of knitting I'd always been curious about and to express my own perspective on this graceful and venerable craft. When that book came out, I was amazed by the number of knitters who'd identified with my experience and then wanted to share their own. Knitters approached me in bookstores, over the Internet, at seminars, wanting to share with me the most precious gift they had: the tales of their own adventures, tribulations, coincidences, and anecdotes of knitting.

This collection represents some of those stories, as well as insights from other knitters and writers generous enough to offer what they, too, have to share.

It is my fervent hope that, whether or not you're a knitter, you will find some aspect of your own story reflected here. Pull up a chair, drape an afghan over your legs, and enter this world. It is a realm in which a pair of needles and a single strand of yarn ties the generations together, a place where the wounds of the human condition are salved, a source of warmth on days when our souls shiver, and a moment to remind ourselves of the importance of the small things in life.

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One: Knit with the Past

Most people have an obsession: mine is knitting.

—ELIZABETH ZIMMERMAN,Knitting Without Tears

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Hand-knit sweaters, booties, socks, shawls, afghans—these items, often delicate and painstakingly created, are not simply functional objects that serve a particular purpose. The things we hand-knit are greater than the sum of their parts; in many ways, they are so much more.

First, there's the wool from which hand-knit items are made bringing with them an ingrained story of sheep life, before this current incarnation as cloth. Then there's the person who carded and spun the wool, whose own relationship to the sheep we may know well, or just speculate about. Maybe the yarn was mass-produced; still, someone selected the dye colors, someone tested the machines, and someone threw the switch to set the spinning into motion. Then there's the person who made the item, knitter, who trails behind her the thread of a unique history. Her own experience of learning to knit—the relationship between knitting teacher and pupil—is a connection inherent in each stitch and every cast-off. Finally, there's the dance of give-and-take between the knitter and the intended wearer of the item: One provides warmth and love in the form of the knitted garment, while the other plays just as important a role by a willingness to receive the gift. Each of us must be both, givers and receivers, for the cycle to continue.

Hand-knit speaks to relationship. It's no coincidence that a family may be characterized as close-knit. From the sheep to the spinner, from the knitting-shop owner to the knitter, from the creator to the intended wearer, knitting is about strengthening ties, about acknowledging connectedness. Knitting is about family, yes, but also about embracing those not related by blood or law, but by love and choice, celebrating the people who have become friends-that-are-like-family, or framily.

Knitting makes manifest the love of a mother passed on to her child, or the concern of an older relative for her young cousin. It enables a daughter to show her larger-than-life father the devotion she feels but cannot name, except in knitted stitches. John McCann's The Big Sweater recounts how, in the Irish tradition, knitted designs were embedded in sweaters, like a coat of arms, to identify the family from which the pattern originated. This knitting also had the darker purpose of allowing easy identification of a fisherman drowned at sea.

All knitting, ultimately, speaks to that abiding truth: Mortality is a fact of life, and while we're here and moving and able, we'll knit all the love and joy, all the awe and wonder we feel into each and every sweater, hat, mitten, and sock we make. We are all linked by the stories we tell, by the myths we share, by the way we knit ourselves together.

my father's scarf

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TheKnittersGift_common My father sold tungsten carbide cutting tools—strong enough to cut a diamond, he would proudly report. As a sales engineer, he'd carry his products in and out of factories filled with machines larger than dinosaurs. Winters in Springfield, Ohio, often blew biting winds that drifted snow up the sides of buildings. I was a Girl Scout in fifth grade at Snowhill Elementary School, trying to earn more badges on my sash. I loved to finger the glossy embroidery inside each circle and imagine my sash ablaze with patches.

I decided that if I learned how to knit, I could knit my father a scarf to accompany him on his sales routes, especially those that took him away for nights at a time. Charcoal gray seemed serious enough to wear to work and would match his black tweed coat, bridging the gap between his collar and the felt-brimmed hat sporting a fan-shaped pheasant feather. After painstakingly knitting several rows, I saw that the scarf would be too wide. I feared if I started over I would lose heart and not begin again, so I lowered my head and knit into this scratchy gray expanse, trying to earn a new identity as resourceful, like my grandmothers.

My father was handsome in a Bing Crosby kind of way, able to dance and sing with grace. He would sing I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha, one moment and Moon River the next. Often, when he was worn out from work and hours of driving, we four children would prove overwhelming to him. His temper would flare and his irascibility would erupt—I'll give you something to cry about! Yet he was the sentimental one, the one who could receive a present with sincere appreciation. He's charming, my mom would concede begrudgingly, but the man you enjoy at a party is usually the man you don't want to take home with you and certainly don't want to live with every day. The house would sometimes shake with their anger. I nurtured the hope of making a present that could erase the wrongs and fill in the gaps. As their marriage unraveled, I imagined knitting the crinkled yarn into the scarf.

My father watched with close attention as the scarf grew row by painstaking row. He asked questions with interest and encouragement as it grew loop by loop, sometimes with a hole or knot and cut yarn—mounting evidence that I was not now and never would be handy. I would mutter Madame Defarge-like into my web of scarf that this was the first and last thing I would ever make. Yet in spite of these protests, the stitches diligently—though unevenly—kept accruing. Trying to make conversation, my father would tilt his head and finger the rows of knitting, asking, How long do you think this will take you? You're working awfully hard, as if I were running up a hill. In the summer he asked, Will it be ready for the falling leaves? At Christmas, past the goal, he asked, How about Valentine's Day?

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When I finished knitting the scarf, my father treated it as the wonder that it was, a handmade gift filled with loops intended for him. How clearly that first putting on of the scarf remains in my mind's eye! Securing one end of the scarf, he deliberately wound it with a staged presence, sustaining eye contact with me as he slowly lifted it. He examined each row of knitting, fingering the bumps and ridges, and shook his head admiringly, as if in my act of knitting I had created a world marvelous and new. He wound that too-wide gray scarf several circles around his neck, working some space with his finger between the high mound of scratchy wool and his stifled neck. Dad wore this hairshirt of his fathering more patiently than he endured my persistent questions and my intense stares of resistance to his barked commands. This wearing of the homemade scarf he could do with grace and élan, and although I flinched to see him buried beneath the broad coils of love, I felt in his cheerful endurance of this ungainly scarf a certain acceptance of me.

The scarf is still in my father's possession, enduring long after his marriage to my mother. He even wore it with his glamorous second wife, who once made a condescending remark about it. We knew silently that her beauty could not cover her lack of emotional warmth and delicacy. And now his third and enduring wife—his true love match—appreciates the scarf and the man who wears it.

My fifth-grade son, Isaac, asked me recently if a friend of ours could teach us how to knit. Isaac has red hair and freckles, and he likes to give presents. When my voice rises in frustration from everyone making demands at once, his eyes drop down and his lips tremble. He has also, like me, taken on the peace-making role. As our friend shows us how to knit, the muscles in my fingers, like someone playing the violin or piano, remember more quickly than the mind, and soon the silver knitting needle slides under the loop and behind the left needle, as the click and tap guide me. The rhythm of sounds drops me back in time even as I burrow into this present moment. I slide the loop up the pole, remembering these sounds of earlier years, imagining the knitting binding the generations together, odd and even, and in spite of missed stitches and often knotted yarn, adding on to the band of love.

TheKnittersGift_common1 Leah Buturain Schneider

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Life is a thread that is never broken, never lost. Do you know why? Because each man makes a knot in the thread during his lifetime: it is the work he has done and that's what gives life to life in the long stretch of time: the usefulness of man on this earth.

—JACQUES ROUMAIN

six and counting

TheKnittersGift_common In 1964, when I was nine, I had a favorite sweater. The thing I liked most about it was that it was blue. Not baby blue, but a grownup blue. Not navy blue, not royal blue—it was sky blue, but not the washed-out sky blue of a spring morning or even the light-and-bright sky blue of a July afternoon. It was the exact blue of an autumn day almost verging on winter, deep without being dark, that perfect color of blue that is not cobalt and not periwinkle, but contains elements of both. It was a substantial sweater, made of a twisted, heavy-gauge yarn, with a large, square collar like that on a child's sailor suit. The collar was fringed around the edges, and there were big blue buttons down the front. There was something about this sweater that made me feel special every time I put it on. It was stylish but practical, and flattering to my blonde hair. I wore the sweater for two years on every possible occasion, beginning with the sleeves rolled up into cuffs and letting go of it only when the ends of its sleeves crept above my wrist bones and it no longer closed down the front. At that point I reluctantly allowed my mother to wash and block it one last time before placing it in tissue paper in a footlocker in the attic, to wait. I was not the last person to wear the sweater, nor was I the first.

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In the summer of 1958, my cousin Carol Sue Walker was nineteen years old. She had just completed her first year at Boston University, and she was living at home in Salisbury, Massachusetts, with her mother and her younger brother and sister while commuting to college. It was a tough first year. In between classes and after 3 p.m., she worked as a secretary's helper in the registrar's office for sixty-five cents an hour. On Fridays she left early and spent Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday morning working as a waitress at Ye Cocke & Kettle. In this way she paid for her commuting expenses, books, clothes, and whatever college fees were not covered by her three scholarships.

Carol Sue's father was no longer in the picture, and her mother, Edith, was supporting her family by doing housecleaning. During the summer, Carol Sue had planned to waitress full-time, putting aside funds for the coming year, but one of her sorority sisters, Richardine Minnig, invited Carol Sue to spend the three-month break at her home in upstate New York. Dean lived in the Catskills, in a small town called Liberty, with her parents, two sisters, and two brothers. Dean had worked during previous summers at Smitty's, a soda shop just down the road from Grossinger's, a popular kosher golf and ski resort. She promised Carol Sue that they could both work at Smitty's and would earn a lot in tips. Carol Sue, who needed a break from the tense atmosphere created by her parents' divorce, agreed.

The hours at Smitty's were irregular. Sometimes the girls would pull the morning shift and have their afternoon and evening free, while other days they'd start work at 2:00 P.M. and work until midnight. The two didn't always get called for the same shift, leaving Carol Sue, a stranger in town, with some hours to fill. She decided to fill them by knitting a sweater for her sister, Anne, who was a petite eleven years old that summer.

Carol Sue had learned to knit at the age of nine. In her small town there were no Girl Scout troops, so the little girls joined the 4H Club as Clover Buds. Instead of raising calves and lambs, the typical pursuit of 4H-er boys, they learned the household skills so highly emphasized in those postwar years. Local mothers took a turn at teaching their particular talents, and Carol Sue and the other girls learned to knit, crochet, sew, and cook. Every summer the Clover Buds would take the nonperishable products of their industry to the Topsfield County Fair, where the crafts were displayed alongside the fat pigs and woolly sheep the boys had brought. During and after her 4H career, Carol Sue had knitted scarves, hats, gloves, and vests, but this was to be her first sweater.

The sweater was Style No. 5955 from Book 68 of the Bernat Handicrafter (Bulky Knits for Girls and Boys), and the yarn was called Bernat Cuddlespun. She picked the heavy yarn and the pattern with the ample collar hoping that it would keep her sister warmer than the average sweater would. Winters were cold in Salisbury, and the meager family budget didn't always stretch far enough for much coal, after $16 per week had been spent on rent. The sweater took Carol Sue about a month to knit, and she presented it to Anne in September after she returned home from the Catskills. Anne, whose favorite color was blue, was delighted with it. She wore it the first day of sixth grade and for a couple of years thereafter.

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In 1961, after graduating from a two-year program at Boston University, Carol Sue moved to northern California and enrolled at the University of California. She lived in Berkeley for three years. Her only relative on the West Coast was her mother's youngest sister, Bernice, who was fourteen years older than Carol Sue and who lived down south in Riverside with her husband, Joe, and their daughter—me. During those three years, Carol Sue often caught a commuter flight down to Riverside for a weekend visit with us. She always brought some little gift for me—bubble bath, cologne, a book, a doll—and every once in a while brought along a boyfriend as well, for a steak dinner on the patio and Aunt Bernie and Uncle Joe's stamp of approval. She was still knitting, but she had discovered a disturbing trend: Every time she knitted a sweater for a boyfriend, they broke up.

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In 1964, Carol Sue found herself at a crossroads: She had been dating a man who had moved to Los Angeles to work at Rocketdyne in the San Fernando Valley, and she was finding a long-distance relationship difficult to maintain. All her friends from Cal Berkeley had graduated and left, and she decided she must either return to Massachusetts—where she would have to find a job, a roommate, and a place to live—or go to Los Angeles to room with a friend there, and be near boyfriend Mike and her California family. She chose Los Angeles. That year, she visited her mother in Massachusetts, and she brought back Anne's outgrown blue sweater for me to wear, cautioning my mother not to give it away when I outgrew it in turn. She also knitted Mike a sweater, and the relationship ended.

Early in 1965, friends of Carol Sue's introduced her to Walter Kaufmann, a young widower with a two-year-old daughter named Karen. She refused to knit him a sweater, and they married in August of that year. Ten months later, their daughter Heidi was born, followed twenty-seven months after that by another daughter, Kirsten. In 1972, during one of the family's visits to Riverside, my mother mentioned to Carol Sue that she still had Anne's (and my) blue sweater stored away in the attic, and she thought it would now fit Karen. Out it came, and down it went: two years with Karen, two years with Heidi, two years with Kirsten. It had become a family rite of passage, the blue sweater one wore from ages nine to eleven and passed to the next candidate.

Back in Massachusetts, Anne had married John Manson and given birth to a daughter, Heather, in 1972, and a son, Corey, in 1975. In 1981, the blue sweater flew back across the country to keep nine-year-old Heather warm through two years of East Coast winters.

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Since the early 1980s, our family has had a shortage of nine-year-old, sweater-wearing girls. Heather is now thirty-one, and the sweater is lying in wait for her daughter, Emily, eighteen months old, to grow into the legacy that unspooled from the knitting needles of her great-aunt in 1958 to provide warmth for six little girls over five decades.

Carol Sue is still knitting, and she attributes her thirty-eight-year marriage to the fact that not once has she knitted anything for Walter—not a scarf, not a hat, not a sock, and certainly not a sweater.

TheKnittersGift_common1 Melissa Garrison Elliott

PATTERN

CHILD'S CHUNKY SWEATER

BY BERNAT

(reprinted by permission of Bernat Yarns)

For child's size 8. Changes for child's sizes 10